Existing wireless terminal devices, such as mobile stations, are provided with several different ways of transmitting messages to a telecommunication network or to another terminal device. Many terminal devices support e.g. transfer of text-form short messages (Short Message Service SMS), multimedia messages (Multimedia Messaging Service MMS) and e-mail messages. Since e.g. SMS and MMS messages enable information of different type to be transferred, each message type is provided with a unique editor of its own. When a user wishes to send a message, he or she typically first has to choose a data transfer application to be used for transferring the message. After the user has chosen the data transfer application, a message editor opens at the user interface to enable the user to enter the message using, for instance, the keypad of the terminal device. An example of such a terminal device is a Nokia Communicator wherein in a messaging view, the first thing to do is to select whether the message to be sent is an e-mail message, a short message or a fax, and, accordingly, an application-specific message editor will open.
For an unaccustomed user, however, it is not always clear as to which editor to choose to send a desired message. For example, if the user wishes to transmit modified text, he or she has to choose the MMS application (and editor) rather than the SMS application since modified text cannot be transmitted as an SMS message. Such special features and limitations of data transfer methods and the editors used therein are often unknown to users, which causes problems in transmitting messages and makes the users unsatisfied. A specific problem concerning SMS messages has been solved by the Nokia Communicator device wherein the editor detects when the length of a message entered by a user exceeds the maximum length, in which case the message is prevented from being transmitted as an SMS message. This known solution does not, however, help the user in taking into account any other limitations of the data transfer methods when choosing the data transfer method.